HALLOWEEN GHOST STORIES

EITHNE FARRY

GLIMPSES OF THE UNKNOWN Edited by Mike Ashley (British Library £8.99, 336 pp)

Mike ASHLeY has delved into the archives of the British Library’s collection of magazines and journals and plucked long-lost and largely unknown supernatural stories from the Golden Age of the ghostly — the 1890s through to the Twenties. Haunted houses, demon dogs and unwitting people possessed unaccountably by restless spirits are creepily described in delightfully old-fashioned prose, the thrum of fear all the more intense for being delivered in the cool, patrician tones of received pronunciation.

There are spooky stories in which objects enact the will of their dead owners (vengeful rapiers, melancholy typewriters); tales of phantoms and apparitions; a gung- ho treasure hunt that ends in horror; and, most fitting for Halloween, a seance story, where an ordinary home is submerged in impenetrable darkness, ‘as black oil would fill a tank’, while hell is unleashed in the hallway.

MR GODLEY’S PHANTOM By Mal Peet (David Fickling Books £12.99, 230 pp) WAr, and all its wounds, is the sombre theme of the late Mal Peet’s final book, an unusual ghost story.

Subtitled An infection Of evil, it chillingly describes what happens when an ordinary man witnesses the most abject horrors and how the resulting psychological damage can poison a life.

Martin Heath was a brave soldier who helped to liberate Belsen and, in the aftermath, is struggling to cope with an abiding depression. Offered a job by an old comrade-in-arms, he becomes a chauffeur for Mr Godley, a frail, elderly man who is sad beyond measure following the death of his son in World War i and the suicide of his wife.

in spare and careful prose, Peet describes the torment of the two men, both scarred by conflicts, haunted by their pasts and keenly, devastatingly aware that moral certainties can no longer be relied upon.